Page 1 of Witness 8

Prologue

Ruby

There’s something wrong with Ruby Johnson.

That’s what her grandma used to say.

These days, Ruby often thought about what her grandmother had said. She wasn’t a little girl any more. She was twenty-two now. Older, definitely wiser and perhaps more self-aware. It often occurred to Ruby that she was not like other people. It happened in moments such as this.

It was coming up on midnight. Ruby was at the counter, stirring a cup of coffee, in a kitchen almost twice the size of her apartment. The kitchen belonged to a thirty-five-million-dollar townhouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Chad and Lara Puller were due to return any time now. They were one of Ruby’s newer clients. She’d been sitting for them for just a few months. Upstairs, Clara, six, and Zara, recently turned three, were fast asleep in their large and expensively decorated bedrooms. Babysitting made up about forty percent of Ruby’s little enterprise. Mostly, she worked as a maid and/or cleaner for most of the high-class residents of West 74thStreet. To buy a house here you had to be seriously rich. Throw a nickel in any direction and you’ll hit a successful Broadway producer, a plastic surgeon, a CEO of a high-end tech company or anyone on the board of a Fortune 500 behemoth. At any time, there could be between twelve and thirty million dollars’ worth of cars parked by the curbs.

The long-term residents grew up here. Old money from New York real estate, not the two-bit slum lords who pretended to be millionaires – these people were rich.

Crazy rich.

And what allowed Ruby into their homes to look after their children, clean their floors and do their laundry was that some of them remembered that Ruby wasone of them.

Or at least sheused to be.

She wasn’t an outsider. She wastheirkind of people.

Or so they thought.

Ruby’s family had money, once.

Or that was what her father would have had people believe.

Ruby certainly thought that she belonged with these people.

Only Ruby’s grandma knew different.

Ruby stirred the coffee and gazed into the dark liquid, her reflection lost in a swirling spiral of foam crema in the center of the cup.

She thought about her grandmother.

As a young child, Ruby would sit on the cold tiles in the grand hallway of her grandparents’ house and eavesdrop as the adults talked in the lounge.

‘There is something wrong with Ruby,’ said her grandmother. Smart lady.

‘What do you mean? She’s quiet. Shy, maybe. But there’s nothingwrongwith her,’ said her mother.

Even as she spoke, Ruby could detect the tone of denial in her mother’s voice. A slight quiver in the throat. Ruby knew, deep down, at the age of ten, that Grandma’s statement hit a lot deeper than her mother would ever reveal. Ruby’s memories of her grandmother were probably all mixed up by her youthful gaze and innocent perspective, but they were still clear enough. Grandma always wore fine gold chains that got caught in the sagging folds of skin that hung around her neck. She alwaysdressed in black, as if in mourning for someone, somewhere, all the time. Her false teeth were loose, giving a clacking, hissing and sometimes gummy sound to her words.

But her eyes . . .

Grandma had huge blue eyes that seemed to take up most of her face. They were misty with age, as if they gazed out behind a thick fog, but those eyes saw everything. And they always seemed to fix on Ruby whenever she entered her grandma’s living room. Those old, dusty sapphire eyes came to life for Ruby. There was no affection in that stare. No curiosity. No love. It was more like – watchfulness. As someone might look upon a stray coyote that had wandered into your back yard.

There’s something wrong with Ruby.

Ruby knew, even then, her grandma was right.

The sound of the front door opening brought Ruby’s mind back to the present.

She took the spoon from the coffee cup, quickly opened the dishwasher and dropped it into the cutlery rack, then closed it and spun round just as Chad and Lara walked in. She flashed a smile.

‘Hi, how was your evening?’ asked Ruby brightly.

‘Insufferable. Bad food, too much small talk. These galas are all the same. But it’s for a good cause,’ said Lara as she held on to the door frame and slipped off her Jimmy Choo heels.